


The dragon

by cuneifire



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 12th Century, Gen, Historical Hetalia, Literacy, Literature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 04:50:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14301177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuneifire/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: England picks up the tome, and tries to decipher it.





	The dragon

**Author's Note:**

> So canon England seems to be agreed upon to really like books, and I agree, but I was wondering how that happened, and I also couldn't miss the opportunity to nerd out so... what can I say. This happened.  
> Also, deals a bit with Christianity, which at the time England isn't too fond of, for various reasons. This wasn't meant to offend anyone of a certain faith or lack thereof.

The book is not old. It is new; in fact, he found it on the steps of the church only recently. It is bound in leather, mounted with high writing and blessed with ink. It sits in the church, untouched.

                England picks it up. He does not read the title, but notes it contains many circles and a few upwards swoops of the pen.

He flicks through it, not staining it but not treating it with the same respect he’d always held books with; those were church scriptures, the ones priests would yell at and threaten to whip you if you touched them wrong. But this book had not been placed up with the high and holy; it was down here, in the middle of a near deserted church in West Saxon. England did not think anyone would care if he picked it up.

He does not know why he picked it up. The array of complicated line combinations people sometimes called words doesn’t hold any particular meaning to him; they don’t pronounce anything, there’s nothing particularly sensible about them.

But, for some reason beyond his comprehension he picks up the book anyways, flipping back to the title and trying to recall what a monk had once told him about reading and writing.

“It changes the way you think, boy.” He had said, writing one of the characters down after another on his scripture. He’d been pointing to it- what was it called? The one that made an ‘eff’ sound’, maybe? England couldn’t recall.

He looked quizzically at the scripture, flipping through the pages to see if there was anything he could recognise, not sure why. But something about this tome, the idea of that there was something he was not capable of understanding and out of his reach- that made him want to hit things, like he felt when he saw Normandy anywhere near him.

But this didn’t feel like being near Normandy. This didn’t feel like anger; this felt like potential. He thinks. Maybe. He doesn’t know, but it feels like _something._

He picks up the tome, leaning into it until the letters (that’s what they’re called, he thinks, pulling out some scattered memories from the back of his mind) are really big and almost- if he looks at it and squints and moves his head a bit- make a tiny bit of sense.

He glares at the page.

He sits there for a while, sifting through passages of the tome, eyes growing heavy when he finds nothing.

                He scrunches up his face in concentration, looking, about to toss the thing down, curiosity be damned to hell when it deserves to be. (That’s what the priests said, right? Or maybe he’d confused that with gluttony or pride of something- he couldn’t keep all the teachings of Christ straight in his head, they just sort of jumbled up his mind)

Just when he’s about to toss the thing into a fire, cost of ink be damned, he finds it.

 _"Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum"_ The fancy writing reads, and he doesn’t understand a word of it.

But that character. That circle. The first one. He knows it.

It’d been late, the trial had almost been running into the night, final rims of the sun burning brightly against the darkness. Shadows had danced across the floor as England had stared down at the text in his hand, the one that the priest had given him, the one the accused was reading.

The man, it was obvious, couldn’t read any other passage of the Bible other than the one he was supposed to put in his defense. But that didn’t matter, because just then, the peasant began to speak.

 _“O God, have mercy upon me…”_ He had said, and there had been that same character, written on the paper of the Bible.

“O-o” He said, pointing to the character in the text, trying to wrap his mind around the sound the character made.

He went on like that, looking at the character with the circle looped to the bottom right of a line, tying it to the end of ‘God’ from the court man’s plea.

                Eventually night fell and he could not read any longer. And for a second, he stared at the book, trying to contemplate if taking it home was worth the risk of being punished by one of the nuns or monks.

The next morning, he woke up early, with a jump, shrugging off his lost sleep with nothing but the blink of an eye and turning to the book he’d tucked under the wood of his bed.

He was reading the book in order now, from first cover to last, and he was two pages into trying to pick up words he could understand.

 _“Beowulf wæs breme blæd wide sprang”_ He stumbled over, recognizing the word at the start to be the same combination of letters on the cover, remembering the double-half loop _m_ character from _mercy_ in the scripture.

He got another line in before heading back to the church where he’d found the book, dropping it in the same place where he’d found it and hoping now one found out he had taken it. His back still hurt from the last time the nuns had decided he’d done something wrong, like stuck his tongue out at them when he’d said the scripture was boring or it didn’t make any sense.

                All that aside, he walked up to the priests confidently, tugging on the end of the robes of the same one who he’d talked to a while ago. That man was older now, bags more sunken in, but still he worked tirelessly.

“Yes, I was just-“ he cut himself off as he saw England glaring up at him.

He paused. “You’re taller than I remember, boy.” He said, lips turned upwards a bit at England’s determined frown.

England didn’t bother to respond.

“Teach me how to read.” He said to the man, not caring about his confused look at the statement. He didn’t need to know about the feeling England had when he picked up that book, that inevitable frustration that came with not being able to _obtain_ something like that, the feeling of something amazing being withheld from him, not just a lesson on which Gods were pagans and which weren’t, or lectures that never ended. Something interesting was in that book, he knew. Something _important._ And if there was something in that book, then there had to be other books like it too. If not now, then at least in the future, right?

The man looked at him, and England glared up at him, expression stern in his decision.

It they didn’t teach him, he’d teach himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes  
> -Beowulf is possibly the oldest text written in English in the world, dating somewhere from the 8th-11th century. It is written in the Western Saxon dialect. Any quotes with weird characters are from the poem.  
> -During 12th-13th century England, people were allowed to present a verse from the bible at court. Illiterate men would often simply memorize one of the lines, a common verse being from Psalm 51.   
>  -The text from Beowulf is often stated as being from earlier times due to its remnants of paganism before the full Christianization of England, which I tried to put a bit of into England’s thinking on Christianity.  
> -The title of the story comes from the third battle in the book, in which Beowulf must fight a dragon. (Apparently this book is also one of the first to use our archetypical fantasy dragon in it, which I found interesting because that means the trope is now at least a thousand years old. Wow.)   
> Hope you enjoyed!


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